Multidimensional Aspects in Occupational Segregation: International Comparisons among European societies and Asian societies

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 22. School-to-Work

Abstract

In most industrialized countries, educational attainment is considered key to achieving high social status. In other words, people have more opportunities for high social status in countries with many educational opportunities. Many social scientists, particularly sociologists, positively perceive education. However, the strength of the correlation between education and occupation is weakening. The reason for that change is clearly because of changes in highly educated industrialized societies. This study explores aspects of occupational segregation by comparing 10 countries in Europe and Asia: The Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Poland, China, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and The Philippines. Using census data, we extended Nakao et al.’s (2016) research on the United States and Japan. The data were derived from the IPUMS-International. We employed correspondence analysis and visualized the associations between educational attainment and occupational type with special attention paid to age and gender differences. We found that: (1) the gaps between two-year college or university or more educational attainment and the “professional” occupational type were relatively small in all 10 countries and (2) the occupational segregation patterns found by Nakao et al. (2016) in the United States and Japan were not typical in the study’s data. The former finding supports the general understanding of global modernization, and the latter finding suggests that overall patterns of occupational segregation significantly vary across countries. These findings imply that aspects of the relationship between education and occupation should be studied within countries and comparatively across countries.

Authors

• Shigemi Ohtsuki, Juntendo University

• Yuya Saitoh, Tokyo Metropolitan University

• Aya Wakita, Rikkyo University